The present invention relates generally to the field of providing customized services, and more specifically to the problem of providing customized telephone services.
Implementing new telephone services has long been a problem for telephone companies. In today's advanced intelligent network ("AIN"), when a new service such as call waiting is developed, the economics of developing and implementing that service require that the service be provided on a mass scale to as many customers as possible. Oftentimes, even if a service is desired by some customers, the service may never be implemented if that service cannot be mass marketed, or otherwise economically justified.
Telephone functions are presently provided to a customer by allowing that customer to select desired functions from a limited number of available services. This approach, which has been called programming a service, may leave many customers without desired functionality. For example, a customer who wants call waiting, but in a form slightly different from what is made generally available, may be told that his simple requests cannot be met.
Moreover, adding a new service to existing services creates significant problems due to possible interaction between the new and existing services. This creates additional obstacles to implementing new telephone services. For example, it is very possible that adding a new service, such as call waiting, may be incompatible in certain circumstances with an existing service, such as call transfer on busy. The usual solution to such interaction problems is to prevent both services from being used by the customer simultaneously. This, of course, limits the power of the new service.
Even when services are compatible, the conventional approach to providing customer services often forces a customer desiring a few limited features of several services to subscribe to several complete services. This is both costly and inefficient.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,611,094 (Asmuth et al.) teaches a method for defining an individual service for an individual customer. In that method, a telephone service is performed by a customer program which a customer defines using conventional program sequences. The program may be executed on the customer's host computer external to the telephone network when a call is processed. Although this method permits a new individual customer service to be configured without modifying the telephone network switching system software, the applicability of such a method is extremely limited. For example, this method cannot implement a new service on a network wide basis because each service is specific to the customer who designed it. This method also requires every customer who uses the service to have an individual host computer external to the telephone system. Furthermore, designing a service requires a computer programmer to write program sequences to define the service, and a programer must make changes to the program sequences to modify the service.
Although the attempt at customization in Asmuth et al. laudable, it highlights the problems which designers have faced in attempting to leave the conventional philosophy of programming a service. One problem is the hardware limitations. The software for developing a customized service for each user must be able to be used on different platforms so that the capability of designing services, as well as testing them, can be made available to as many users as possible.
In addition, the design of services cannot require standard programming because the cost and difficulty of providing such customization will make it too expensive to employ.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system capable of providing multi-function, single services that can be implemented economically.
Another desirable feature for such a system would be a mechanism for designing multi-function, single services easily and without need for knowledge of the underlying system.
Yet another desirable feature would be easy transportability of the system, or of parts of the system, to other machines or devices.
It is also desirable to provide a system to allow easy testing and implementation of new multi-functioning, single services.
Additional desires of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.